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I had a really hard time with Neuromancer, but I really enjoyed Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I just found Neuromancer really technical and a bit hard to follow...Maybe it was just me though, because most people seem to prefer it over the rest of the trilogy.

I read it for the first time about a year ago and didn't find it too juvenile. The characters are young but the story is good. And the next two are good as well. However I did not enjoy Ender's Shadow.

You should read this essay by John Kessel about morality in Ender's Game. (It does contain spoilers.) Basically,

"God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade!"

"The problem is that the morality of that abused seventh grader is stunted."

Personally, I enjoyed the books I read, but found the themes a bit less explored than I would like. When I'm reading, I'm completely caught up in them, but when I sit back I think, "wow, that's kind of dangerous and problematic."

Asimov wrote for a primarily young audience. I remember loving his Foundation series as a child, but when I returned to it as an adult, I couldn't help but be disappointed.

Dan Simmons is known to have fallen off his rocker a bit, and so his later books get progressively less interesting. Hyperion is one of my favorites but I don't think I can in good conscience recommend anything further from him.

Philip K Dick was a good friend of one of my writing instructors, and was a very eccentric man. One story that always stuck with me was when Dick was proposing to his girlfriend (having already remarried and divorced, possibly multiple times - I forget). He was at a restaurant with my instructor, Tim, and was mid-proposal. Tim realized that Dick was probably too busy - what with proposing marriage and all - to notice if one measly pickle went missing from his plate. So Tim reached over and grabbed a pickle. Dick promptly stopped mid-proposal and lectured Tim on how unethical he was and demanded the return of the pickle.

Heinlein is from a radically different generation, and I find many of his idioms and themes to be vaguely unsettling. Sexism plays such a huge role in all of his works that it's hard to ignore.

As for my own recommendations:

I cannot recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts enough. Watts is a marine biologist and his aliens are so effortlessly believable, chilling, and intriguing (all at once) that you really shouldn't pass him by. Blindsight goes so far as to include multiple afterwords that include citations to scientific journals providing evidence for the plausibility of some of his crazier themes.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is one of the richest novels in science fiction. There is so much story and backstory, such a complex universe, so many interlocking themes and characters. Even if you dislike it, following the trails of some of his references to philosophy and history will lead you to other excellent books.

Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams is possibly the most epic science fiction book I've ever encountered. It begins with Earth today and concludes with the heat death of the universe, sketching out an interesting and plausible "in-between." Baxter is a mathematician and engineer and he brings in a lot of rigorous science to make his writing more interesting.

Iain M Banks' The Algebraist is probably the wittiest, funniest science fiction out there today. (Ignoring, of course, the unassailable Hitchhiker's Guide.) He writes with a quintessentially Scottish voice, and all of his dialogue is imminently realistic and exciting.

If you're looking for something more "classic," I've always liked Haldeman. His experience in the Vietnam War made him a very cerebral, anti-war writer while at the same time lending all of the conflict in his books an air of realism. Study War No More is a great young adult book, All My Sins Remembered is a nice fast-paced action novel, and Forever War is his most famous work.

Also just some fast and quick ones, these cover a wide variety of styles and themes and I can provide more information if the titles catch your interest: Charles Stross' Singularity Sky, Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space, Greg Bear's The Forge of God (also his Eon and Eternity books), Robert Sawyer's Calculating God is a fun, short one, Michael Crichton's Timeline is an oldie-but-goodie, and James Blish's Cities in Flight is one of my absolute favorite old-school scifi novels.

shadow and claw as well as the foundation trilogy are wonderful, seismic books. along with dune and some pkd you should be off to a good start! be patient with shadow and claw and dune, both are more challenging than the others.

Foundation and Empire made Asimov my favorite fiction writer; if you like the Foundation series you'll probably also like his Robot series. Also I'm reading Hyperion right now and it's definitely intriguing.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. The first book is, naturally, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Edit: In addition to Dune I would recommend reading The White Plague, The Eyes of Heisenberg and Destination: Void all by Frank Herbert. I would also give The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Dr. Morough by H.G. Wells a read through. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is also rather good if I do say so.

The movie version I found was hilarious, and would not be put off the book by it at all. The Time Machine was probably one of the first real Sci-Fi books I read. It will always have a special place in my heart.

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury, The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. LeGuin, C.S. Lewis wrote a Sci-fi trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, but be careful it has a huge religious overtone, so if you're not into that then skip them. I consider H.G. Wells' Time Machine, Invisible Man and War of the Worlds to be Sci-fi, but probably not the type you may be looking for. Otherwise all these other nice people who have posted before me have you covered.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi.
Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

I completely agree with all of the Douglas Adams books! Also it isn't all sci fi, but look into Terry Pratchett. It's a nice mix. Good Omens that he wrote with Neil Gaiman is fantastic. I'm getting ready to start the Edgar Rice Burroughs books about John Carter. Heard good things from a friend

Everybody enjoys things different, so I won't wish for your eternal burning too much haha. Have you heard of that book by Ernest Cline? It is essentially Charlie and the chocolate factory meets Tron. Is a hugely geeky fun book

In addition to all the other great suggestions (particularly seconding Rendezvous with Rama, Starship Troopers and Ender's Game) I'd add The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (which goes well with Dune as two of a very small group of sci-fi novels focused on ecology).

I recommend Books 1-4 of the Dune series. But I s'pose you can wait to see if you like Dune first. A word on Dune - it will be slow going to start with, but stick with it.

I wasn't particularly thrilled with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.. There are better books to start reading with, IMO - some of which have been recommended already.

I would include Asimov's I, Robot which is a series of short stories explaining and playing around with the 3 laws of Robotics.

I strongly second recommendations of "Martian Chronicles" (Bradbury)and Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein). You may find these too "philosophical" for your liking though. If you are into more "action-sci-fi", skip them. Or, pick up Martian Chronicles to see how you like it first. If you like the "philosophical angles" ... you may enjoy "Speaker for the Dead" which is Book 2 in Ender saga - after Ender's Game.

I don't know if M. Crichton qualifies as sci-fi for you, but I enjoyed reading Timeline and I recommend it.

The OP should start looking into science fiction short stories as well. The Foundation series started off with short stories (the "trilogy" was originally published as a series of short stories in Astounding. Asimov didn't start writing books until much later.) and there are plenty of great science fiction short stories republished through anthologies and otherwise to go through. I would say that short stories are the real reason I like science fiction as much as I do. I once had a science teacher who kept copies of the old pulps in his classroom and it was wonderful.

Nightfall (1941) by Isaac Asimov is considered one of the best science fiction short stories of all time (it was later rewritten into a book with Robert Silverberg). And I, Robot has essentially nothing in common with the Will Smith film.

I tried to read Asimov but I had a hard time getting into him. I also tried reading Hyperion and put it down after about 100 pages. I do like Iain Banks and Peter F Hamilton ..they're worth looking into just to see if you find them interesting at all - they're considered 'space opera' and are distinctly different from what you're currently reading.